TRUMP FACES A DAUNTING DECISION ON KOREA

The greater Kim Jong Un’s success in ‘peace diplomacy’, the more difficult he calculates it will be for Donald Trump to push the red button that denotes a full-scale war of elimination of North Korea’s offensive capabilities.

Donald J. Trump is accurate when he blames his predecessors for causing the dilemma that the 45th President of the United States finds himself in on the nuclear capabilities of the DPRK ( North Korea). President Bill Clinton had the best chance of settling the issue in a manner satisfactory to US interests, but waffled and shifted goalposts frequently, thereby confusing Pyongyang. Since the USSR had collapsed, the Clinton administration was taken in by NGOs claiming to have the means to generate mass agitations against the Kim family, claims that proved to be a hoax. The consequence of the belief within the Clinton White House that they could topple the Kim family on the cheap, led to a reneging of secret commitments made to the DPRK, a factor which led to the acceleration of a nuclear program that till then had been given only secondary importance when compared to the build-up of conventional forces. The Clinton era was riddled with lost opportunities, including the possibility of an alliance with India during the period (1992-96) when P.V. Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister. The Clinton White House let go of this chance by demanding that Delhi make impossible concessions to Pakistan on Kashmir and at the same time dismantle its entire atomic research program. Secret exchanges between the United States and Indian sides during that time show how the Clinton administration defined “dual use” nuclear technology in such a broad way that the entire program begun by Homi Bhabha in the 1950s would have had to be sent to the junkyard. In the case of North Korea, Kim Jong Il was willing to scale back the program to “Iran nuclear deal” levels and even below such a threshold, and sent several feelers to the US side for high-level talks on this, all of which were insult- ingly ignored by the Clinton White House, that saw the DPRK as being vulnerable to internal subversion. His successor did little better. Puffed up by initial successes in Iraq, President George W. Bush (2001-2009) zeroed in on a “maximum concessions from North Korea, zero from the US” negotiating stance that was not backed up with any serious